They deserve it. They've completely screwed themselves by not having even a nodding look at conservatism. Republicans had their time to prove themselves, and they proved they're just as bad and hypocritical as the democrats, and now they're going to lose the exectuive and legislative branches.
Many people, regardless of their "party" or lack thereof, are fiscally conservative and socially liberal in their day to day lives. We generally don't want to pay 90% in taxes, and we don't generally care what people do in their own homes, in their own lives, and we prefer if they don't get involved in telling us what we should be doing in our own lives either.
democrats and republicans have both failed completely, frankly I don't know what the difference is, other than republican's extremism is religion and democrat's extremism is environmental.
I've consulted at two companies now, which I won't mention, which used Tata in order to outsource, and in both cases the people that "made the deal" were getting a "per-hour" arrangement with Tata.
If you've never contracted through a third party before...it's common to receive a few bucks an hour of the billable time any other contractor you recommend to your agent or third party. I've made a dollar-an-hour "finders fee" for recommending someone that was later picked up by the client for every hour they billed. This is much like the bonuses at companies that give you a taste if you recommend another employee to be hired.
At the companies that used Tata, the same system was at the top level too. The executive at the top level that made the deal also got a small percentage of every Tata resource that was utilized. Multiply that by several dozen resources or more, and you can imagine the incentive to move as many jobs to Tata as possible by this executive.
I even saw a benefit by this. One of my clients that I was placed at had a large contract with the agency I went through. They "let me go" as a contractor during a time that they were cutting costs, but because the budget had already been sent to the agency, they continued to pay me to "work from home" and do virtually nothing just so the Director of the division could get his percentage cut.
One wonders what Nielson needs to outsource to Tata for anyway. Their internet and TV ratings divisions daya can be analyzed and OLAPed by any basic data analysis of the participating members...one wonders what they need to outsource. Pay them to watch the shows themselves?
"Black" operations are a good thing. In war are we supposed to be in red coats on a hill while our leaders make BraveHeart "Win one for The Gipper" morale-boosting comments?
Then we all run screaming into a big mess in the middle with weapons flying all over the place?
You WANT nothing but "black" operations. The only people hurt in a standard war are:
The soldiers who weren't politically connected enough to be in the bunker.
Everybody else.
You want wars where there little chance of you, a friend, or a family member getting hurt, killed, or in turn losing someone. You want to have professional special operations teams in foreign lands killing bad guys, disrupting their operations, destroying their credibility through propoganda, and keeping them from being able to cause you problems. If ~1000 special operations people, intelligence advisors, technical advisors and the like can keep you from having to be conscripted into an army you don't want to be in, then it's a good thing. If "black" operations can help prevent a hundred thousand citizens who don't even support their dictatorship from being "collateral damage" then it's a good thing. If you can limit your targets to the "bunker" people in a war, that's the absolute best thing.
Screw these lies. We know they're hacking, they know they're hacking. What are we stupid?
Anyone who's played Red Alert Generals knows that the Chinese Generals ALL have hackers you can be bought after you buy the barracks and upgrades.
Those bastards can endlessly hack for money or control buildings. They build their own internet cafe for Christ's sake! "We'll suck the internet dry" is the quote they say as when they steal money.
Damn lying Chinese. They're craftier than the Soviets with their lies. Or is it "Ries"? Damn them to hell.
Typical isn't it? Every time there's a judge or jury member who supports constitutional rights, individual responsibility or choice, or really any sense of freedoms, there almost always comes up some sort of scandal with them, I don't know, practicing or supporting those rights. If this was an RIAA case, it would have been him posting up his personal playlist on a website or keeping his (legal) mp3s on a fileshare he didn't know others could see.
Whenever a judge or prosecutor ends up having KKK affiliation, being a secret member of the communist or nazi party, guilty of corruption or bribery, hiding or manufacturing evidence, or anything of the like, you hear about it years AFTER the cases that they sent people to prison, sent someone for the past 50 years on death row, created case law to screw the American citizen just a little harder, etc.
Maybe it's just me. I must have a guilty conscience with something to hide.
Personally I hate instant messaging. I uninstall it if the network force installs it, and barring that, I disable it through any means necessary, and boy do I get in trouble with that.
My issue stems from a privacy angle and a productivity angle. I'm in one of those positions where (and I'm sure I'm alone here) I do all my work without any assistance because I know what I'm doing, and recent hires and offshore has no idea what they're doing so I receive 800 phones calls, emails, and IMs a day so that I can do THEIR work, in addition to all my work.
When I have a technical question about the work I'm doing, I generally look in the help files, look up the API in a programmers reference, query MSDN, or archaic eastern european websites for the answer. My "coworkers" would not only be useless to ask, but would actually give even worse information if I was to ask them. Call me an elitist bitch if you want.
When they don't know what to do (such as something complicated like trying to write a Sql statement that returns the date or write a bubble sort algorithm) I'm the first person to bother, because as we all know, the internet has no factual information on it, only porn and pedophiles.
If I use IM software, every jackass bothers me into the ground with inane, useless questions and comments, which do nothing but waste my time doing their work.
I tried to use the "flag" to show me busy, out of office, unavailable, in a meeting, or whatever, and then I get phone calls and emails wondering where I am, if I'm taking a sick day, etc.
Screw IMs. IMs work great for 1) unproductive people that want to bother others and be social rather than look up information on their own because they are lazy, 2) managers who want to electronically monitor someone realtime and stack more shit on their plate and, 3) the client who wants 300 status updates a day on some production issue, ignoring their place in the food chain and queue of workload.
It's easier just to claim the image is corrupt or it's "not working", and keep destroying it whenever the network reinstalls it.
The sun isn't changing. Man causes climate change, the climate change causes solar activity to change.
Now that I've proved it the solution is to create a economic cap-and-trade system that creates a secondary market for the redistribution of wealth from people that earned it(good, bad, ugly, fairly, or unfairly) to people that didn't.
Surely you know that the movements of pieces of green paper around the earth will cause a perfect eden to exist like northern California worldwide don't you?
The only people one should be afraid of are your fellow passengers who meekly go to their deaths like sheep.
I've always gotten in trouble for this opinion: 100% of the blame for 9/11 does not belong to the government, the airlines, failures with the CIA, George Bush, or anything else. The fault lies with the passengers on the planes that were used in the attacks.
I have always found it sad that, as a people, we've beome so easily exploitable but then, I do blame our school systems and political climate for producing citizens that would allow this to happen.
American Airlines 11 had 81 passengers, plus pilots and crew.
United Airlines 175 had 56 passengers plus pilots and crew.
Assume five hijackers per plane. The hijackers were armed with rudimentary knives, not guns, so they could only engage in 1-on-1 combat at best. A passenger ratio of 16 to 1 and 11 to 1 respectively per hijacker.
In another time and culture they would have all been killed immediately, or at least incapacitated and turned over to authorities.
This is what happens when you mold a culture of compliance, obedience, group-think, disrespect for individual rights and freedoms, fear of self-defense, and a the-government-will-take-care-of-me mentality.
So the TSA is requiring IDs and busting you if you don't give them through refusal instead of having "lost" it. You've been trained to accept being treated like this. Want to see something sad? Go to the airport (if it's setup correctly), get a coffee, and sit and just watch for about 30 minutes the people going through the security lines. Watch your fellow citizens file in line, take their shoes off, throw away shampoo, open laptops and cellphones and all the other ridiculous things that are done. Over and over and over.
Go watch that and then go read any newspaper and see another story about how two kids had a grade school shoving match, and rather than be told "break it up, get your ass back in class", they are arrested, expelled, and have zero-tolerance policies thrown at them.
What is being taught is not "violence isn't the answer to any of life's problems"; they're being taught that even thinking about defending oneself or standing up for oneself IS MET WITH HARSH PUNISHMENT.
So we are educating more and more young people to become complacent, obedient, and fearful people. I have some younger friends of mine that are afraid to go and challenge a traffic ticket, or aren't even aware a traffic court system exists to do so. One is terrified to return food that they are unsatisfied with in a restaurant because they think they'll get in trouble and the manager will (I guess) be critical or mean to them.
But to get back on point. As long as we're used to doing whatever we're told, you'll see asanine rules like this. It isn't important that you don't have ID, what's important is that YOU ARE STANDING UP TO US AND MUST BE PUNISHED.
Coerce or harrass? I'm pretty sure there were a few landmark cases about First Amendment rights and being able to harrass and coerce people. Does this mean that I can cry foul when I see something "icky" on TV that "upsets" me?
It's getting time to buy a boat built to last and get the hell off off the American land-mass.
I hope this finally serves as a "wake up call" for Linux lickers and lovers that using Linux does increase chances of violence and murder. For too long now Linux lovers have accused Microsoft of tomfoolery, when Microsoft has only delivered wholesome, moral, and radidly patched products.
Perhaps now they'll finally start listening to the studies that Linux and open-source leads to genital herpes and PWNING your wife with a.45 and a shovel.
The main thing I learned from studying psychology for six years in university is that every study apparently has an agenda, and with all the ones I participated in as a member or a researcher, they are all based on faulty assumptions about how humans work, and how people respond when they know they're being studied.
The "conclusions" below, are inherently rife with all sorts of debatable points.
* developed an increased sexual callousness toward women
Or the kind of people that will get paid/studied to watch hard core porn for weeks are the kind of people that already have sexual callousness.
What the hell is sexual callousness anyway? I'd argue that it's the default setting for males, who are not mate-for-life animals, despite what the Bride Magazine and the Bible leads us to believe.
* began to trivialize rape as a criminal offense or no longer considered it a crime at all
Or were just being more honest about what they actually thought. Few people run around telling everyone they know they trivialize rape, murder or such due to the social consequences. I'm pretty sure I'm not the first person to consider murder as a viable alternative to dealing with customers or employers or family members. In America we trivialize rape, murder, and violence constantly in our culture. Football and UFC are acceptable "alternatives" to violence that we aren't allowing ourselves to do, so we invent a rule-based sport, unless we can make a case for war somewhere on earth, then we do it with a vengence. Rape was never considered a crime in marriage, until very very recently. Women married in their early teens. Hard core porn exists because it's something we cannot acceptably do, though plenty of people want to. Porn doesn't invent the desire. We have the desire so some people like it. We don't like abused children, but B. Spears claimed to be a virgin in a schoolgirl costume and sold a whole lot of albums. I'm sure eveyone watched her videos for the music.
* developed distorted perceptions about sexuality
That's agenda all over. What is "distorted"? Anything other than missionary? Bologna. Define normal please.
* developed an appetite for more deviant, bizarre, or violent types of pornography (normal sex no longer seemed to do the job)
Normal sex rarely does the job anyway, but I'm a pervert. I'm sure oral sex is deviant and bizarre too (so silly, you'll never make a baby that way). I feel sure that this study should have concluded that wasting time trying to give the girl an orgasm is bizarre and distorted. In my biology classes they stressed that female orgasms are not relevent to procreation. The Bible we're supposed to procreate, not enjoy it, so she doesn't get one. Amen.
* devalued the importance of monogamy and lacked confidence in marriage as either a viable or lasting institution
Agenda. Monogamy is an invention from thousands of years ago to protect children and provide for women. It isn't natural at all, for men or women. I base this on the observation that almost everyone has had sex with more than one person (slashdot excepted) and many times cheat on each other. Also, we apparently have divorces from monogamy, when it get's too boring, so we don't take it that seriously.
* viewed nonmonogamous relationships as normal and natural behaviorxi
Agenda. That's because it isn't normal behavior. We lust or have sexual thoughts about other people all the time. We may emotionally have strong connections to an individual, but sexually it's normal to think of someone else now and then or appreciate a woman's assets as she walks by.
I haven't paid for a movie in years. I found this neat little tool that get's me pretty much any movie I want for free.
They call it a library card.
I hadn't heard of the thing before, but there was this big building with lots of bums sleeping around it (just like Blockbuster) which had a wide variety of books, movies, and music where I'd walk in, grab a bunch of movies and such, use my card, and walk out.
The best part was I didn't have to fill up my house with DVDs or buy bigger drives to store them on. When I was done with it I just tossed it in this big box at the building (I guess they recycle the DVDs, I don't know).
I've told my friends about this but they just laugh and call me a nerd, but when you're technically advanced I guess there are always detractors.
This will continue, of course, until the fetishization of children decreases, and by that I mean the fetishzation of children by their parents and government.
Ignoring relatively recent human history where children in their early teens were married off, soldiers in wars, or running businesses/plantations/families, we have now created an overindulgent culture of keeping adults as children as long as humanly possible for the enjoyment of parents and politicians who exploit them.
An aquaintance of mine refers to her dog as "puppy" and treats him as such, regardless of the fact that the dog is 13 years old and on it's last legs. The dog is completely untrained, as to be expected, but now is not even getting some required medical care for a dog of it's age because that might be some sign that the animal isn't a puppy nor immortal.
Sadly, most of the "parents" I know now are doing similar things with their children. I've overheard conversations between parents chiding each other for cutting junior's hair ("His curls are so cute! We can't cut them!", "Yes, but he's 8 and looks like a roadie from Foghat"), not letting a 6 year old stay up until 3a.m ("She's playing! We have to let children be children!", "Yes dear, but I have to set up for Foghat in the morning."), and my favorite told to my idiot 14 year old nephew ("It doesn't matter what grade that teacher gave you, as long as you tried your best that's all that matters."). Having tried that technique of project completion with employers has met with limited success.
Luckily, if the child might be showing any signs of rebellion, intelligence, or desire to flourish on their own terms, there are a slew of "disease du jour" and designer drugs to keep them in that glassy-eyed / dopey-smiled state of puppiness. Autism/aspergers/marjoram/whatever is always available in case junior shows a but too much resistance. Pigeon hole them now, keep them in size XXL diapers when they're 16, and keep them from ever leaving mommey and daddy's side. Because as long as they stay, mommy and daddy aren't really, you know, grown-ups or old themselves.
Now I'm sure there are plenty of kids with "real" mental issues out there. I suspect if the bell curve is to be believed that at least 50% of the population has difficulty telling one end of a chalupa from another, and if special-ed classes and living with their parents until they're 40 gets my drive-thru order right at least most of the time, then it can't be all that bad.
Before I get modded for being too off topic, let me seamlessly tie that right back in to the article somehow.
Although real child abuse does occur, most likely it isn't the creepy guy in the street with the bad haircut and thick glasses on slashdot, it's the parent, family relative, or friend that does most of the molesting/abuse. The german sex-ring isn't photographing little Briegh or Taylour as they play in the back yard, it's the baby sitter or cousin or uncle Joe who is doing far worse when no one's watching, and since families rarely turn in one of their own, it's just quietly kept under wraps like the Catholic Church did with "misbehaving" priests who had a taste for alter boys.
Politicians, knowing this but powerless to prevent it, love to pick up the banner of saving the children from some unknown danger from one of those southeast asian countries with a sex-ring and is much more marketable than passing laws that would prosecute a mother as an accessory who stands by allowing their children to be molested by their new boyfriend but pretending it isn't happening because she doesn't want to "rock the boat".
It doesn't matter that laws that would prosecute a completely digitally created image where no abuse occurred to anyone would also include 450 year old paintings that show fat naked cherubs (with little penii!) flying around Aphrodite getting it on, consenting adults role playing together (any second they'll have the urge to molest real kids, like them homosexuals!), or the XTian bible raping virgi
I just hook my phone up to the USB port and use the external internet connection when I'm wasting time at work. Why go through the firewalls and proxy servers who don't even allow me to download pr0n to post random useless crap?
I refuse to be fired for my pr0n love. It's a legal disability.
Foreign ticket holders will most likely be people of wealth/influence compared to the general population; Guojia Anquan Bu will collate and data mine all the information for likely targets for intelligence gathering.
Having comprehensive preliminary data on ticket holders will allow agents to be assigned to high-value individuals, either for passive intelligence gathering, such as profiling for future contact, economic franchising (here's what China can do for your organization), or more active measures (finding those with weaknesses or proclivities that could be later exploited for blackmail/extortion, such as having them approached by prostitutes, etc.).
"The movie established that the skulls attract "artifacts" (almost in an intelligent way), possibly due to the aliens' obsession with human culture. Also, shotgun pellets are NOT made of lead, despite what the common name may suggest:)"
Alright, I'll give you that one. Perhaps the skulls attract "artifacts", however they also attract rapier swords, pieces of random metal, and fragmentation grenade explosive powder. I'm not sure exactly where those come in. That MAY explain the room with the artifacts from around the world, but I'm not buying something with the power to pull artifacts, but getting fooled by a piece of cheesecloth being draped over me doesn't make sense. Neither does repelling ants. And if a piece of cloth over the eyes prevents it, then how did it pull things when it was in the steel coffin in area 51? I still think it's pretty weak.
"Oh come on, are we going to start holding continuity shots against movies now? Seriously. Pick on something worthwhile."
In the case of a bunch of minitures blowing around a fake tiny town to emulate an explosion yes I will. This is not my work that I did with a webcam, this was one of the biggest special effects companies on the planet, who can make Greedo fire first. Not getting the fan to blow correctly on the set is not an excuse for being so blatant it's all I could see. It's not like I'm arguing a continuity flaw such as not having a fan blow on a couple of Jedi hanging out in a speeder 1000 ft. above a planet going 200 mph while their hair doesn't even blow slightly. Because that would be stupid.
"Because it's ALIEN, INTER-DIMENSIONAL technology? Seriously, you can't complain about ET phone home suckage in one sentence, and then complain about how their fantastic aliens were UNREALISTIC."
Oh you misunderstand. I'm have no problem with alien interdimensional vacuum cleaners. They can do what they want. I cannot go with is a swirling city sized flying saucer come rising out of the ground, pull up giant chunks of rock and bedrock and ancient temples, then they hover in the air before remembering what gravity is after all the other pieces fell down.
I will say that all my bitching isn't relevent. It's just funny, and exists in any sci-fi movies these days. The entertainment and comedic level now exceeds the wonder level. I can live movies that have just given up completely.
What bothered me more was the change in canon / mythos in a series of stories (or serials as I'm sure georgie thinks of them). Prof. Jones used to be about sharing information with the world. Things needing to be in museums. Defeating evil that wants to use it's power for evil purposes. He also was always making a moral or ethical choice in some way. In Raiders he got the ark, then gave it to the government and didn't keep the power to himself, who then locked it away in area 51 apparently. In Temple he returned the magic stones to the villagers after rescuing their children from brutal conditions. In Grail he was trying to save his father and when making a choice between being seduced by the grail and giving it up, he realized the futility and what was important and let it go.
In this one, I don't know why Jones is even on this quest. He starts out as kidnapped by Soviets and escapes. Then, I guess, he decides to follow the skull and tacitly look for John Hurt. He returns the skull for reasons that aren't completely clear, other than it's supposed to be "returned". He doesn't make a moral choice about using the skull's powers for himself or trying to claim the "reward" (whatever that was) for himself. He basically runs away. You may be able to argue "Well, he got Marion and a son, because he's shown throughout the characters history that he has always wanted that." That might work if I believe that BS line about "the other women weren't you.", but that seems kind of weak.
Perhaps there was a scene I missed an important statement in. Maybe a scene explaining more about what was going on with the characters was cut in the end and will explain more on the DVD.
That sounds more like the "Dilbert Principle". The Peter Principle says that people rise to their level of incompetence. For example, you are a C# developer, if you do well you may be promoted to dev manager or similar, but no higher because, say, you don't have an MBA and would therefore be incompetent at that level. You WOULD know what developers below you were doing, but you couldn't rise higher than you are. The Dilbert Principle says that incompetent people will be promoted. For example, your dev manager knows nothing about code, so he was put in charge of code because he sucked (or most likely just politically transferred in, but I digress).
In my case, I have a manager that doesn't understand crap about what I do, therefore he makes consistently stupid decisions and has stupid ideas, "Why do we HAVE to have a web server to run a website?", or "The web application is throwing database connection errors? It must be the website is down." or my favorite "I want to talk directly to the mainframe instead of the database to get the data, can we do that by the end of the week?"
DO NOT READ AS THIS MAY SPOIL YOUR MOVIE EXPERIENCE, IF FOR SOME REASON YOU THOUGHT IT WOULD BE A POSITIVE THING
The new Indiana Jones was, frankly, the biggest POS I have ever had the displeasure of watching, and I was a huge fan of the original three.
Once I saw the green LucasFilm logo and Exec. Prod. credit for Lucas I had the same weird feeling that I had at the beginning of Phantom Menace, which I also get when eating Taco Bell, with pretty much the same end result.
Luckily I obtained a free advance screening, so I didn't have to spend a dime on this crap, but even that doesn't change the awfulness of this film.
I had heard some rumors of an "area 51" or "alien" type of theme rather than the usual religious one, but I figured it would be passing references, or perhaps some nifty little ending like they did with the warehouse scene at the end of Raiders or something.
But then I remembered George was involved, AND I remembered what idiocy Steven did to E.T. with radios and such. Luckily, there won't be remakes of this like E.T., because they got it all out of the way in this one.
Rather than ruin the plot, whatever it was, here's a random list of stuff that sucked. Don't read it if you like the fantasy of Indiana Jones.
1. Shia the Beef as a 50s Biker; I assume a gay 50s biker, who bitches like a gay Biker for no apparent reason.
2. All the soldiers on the army base having been deployed to Iraq, or missing for no apparent reason. "Closed for weapons testing" means that all the soldiers and contractors go home.
3. Colonel Henry Jones, master spy for the CIA.
4. Col. Jones being interrogated by the FBI for being a Soviet agent, but is let off because some random character "vouches" for him.
5. Col. Jones being fired from his job for being a Soviet agent.
6. Col. Jones being promoted to a better job for being a Soviet agent.
7. Col. Jones, in Berlin, being a double agent.
8. Director Steven, shamelessly plugging his kid in the diner scene.
9. Crazy Primitive Alien Monkees in a graveyard running away from a gun and disappearing with no explanation.
10. A crystal skull designed by H.R. Geiger, which wouldn't have sucked in another movie, but chooses to in this one.
11. Gold is not magnetic, neither is lead.
12. An awful premonition that you will be subjected to Jar Jar.
13. An Army of the Dead, which apparently left the set to star in Diary of the Dead, as they seemed absent from the film. Luckily, the Crazy Primitive Alien Monkees were able to stand in for them.
14. Apparently ILM still hasn't figured out gravity. In the real world, lighter pebble sized objects may stay aloft because of high winds, however rocks the size of office buildings tend to fall. In the ILM world, dust settles, then giant rocks hang aloft in a way I haven't seen since a Coyote held up a sign after running off a cliff 20 seconds earlier.
15. A room containing every artifact of every culture ever, for no apparently explained reason.
16. Yay, it's Jar Jar! No wait, a dozen Jar Jars!
17. Jar Jar promising you a gift for freeing him after thousands of years, but when you ask for something benign that ancient carvings have shown he gave everyone else on the planet, he kills you for no reason.
18. Triple agents?
19. In the past, the bad guys were eaten by crocodiles, had high speed aging to dust, or exploded and melted for pissing God off. Now if you are male, Jar Jar kills you with an advanced vacuum cleaner, if you are female he kills you with Wikipedia then an advanced vacuum cleaner.
20. Assistant Dean Super CIA Col. Henry "Indiana" Higgins Jones get's hitched?
21. A teleporting hat?
22. An atomic blast, which destroys buildings, has to make a second pass because it forgot the mannequins hanging out in front of the buildings.
23. Col. Jones, Master Spy, is rescued by Shia the Beef with what appears to be a large g
I've never understood this "universal national socialized insurance" thing. I thought this was about going to a doctor.
I'll admit I didn't grow up in the United States, but isn't medical care, going to a doctor, dentist, whatever, just another good or service?
When did a good or a service become a "right" that one has, to the extent that you have the government stick a gun in someone else's face and a hand in their pocket to force them to pay for it?
If I can't be forced at gunpoint to take a stranger to dinner and pay for it (food being a clear and present biological requirement for life), why am I forced at gunpoint to pay for someone to see a doctor (medical care being a series of theories, guesses, best practices, empirical research, and pharmacology)?
I don't understand this adherence to propoganda that everyone is talking about. If the "issue" is about medical care (which seems to be just a "class warfare" discussion from what I've observed ("THEY" pay for a good or service so "THEY" are rich/evil and the "OTHERS" don't pay for the good or service so the "OTHERS" are victims of "THEY") then WHY are you discussing insurance? Is someone going to be lying on the floor bleeding and desperately clutching an insurance contract?
I'm don't understand why people would want an insurance company (or the goverment) making the medical decisions instead of the patient and the doctor. An insurance company's primary goal is to make as much profit as possible, by paying out less in claims that in takes in from premiums. The government's primary goal is to control you as much as possible and separate you from your money. Can someone explain to me exactly WHY you want either of these organizations to control your healthcare?
At one point I remember hearing about nationalized / socialized health care from politicians. Then the language changed so the argument was about health insurance. Doesn't anyone find that a little strange? I hear all these moral and ethical stories about "helping the poor" and "so and so was turned away from the hospital because she couldn't pay" and such. Yet with such moral outrage and despair, the solution is an insurance contract? I'd think with such a horrible fate for citizens that it would be easy to set up a program like:
Immediately offer low interest student loans to encourage students to go into medicine. The loan paid in full by the government following the successful completion of the 5 year low salary (by doctor standards) employment contract in a licensed clinic/hospital, subject to oversite and auditing by the Health Department.
Anyone can go to a clinic at any time for any reason. They MUST pay an inflation adjusted $50 payment, regardless of what services they are using, or what their means are. The payment is used to offset equipment costs, doctors salaries, payback of student loans, administration, etc. This payment is tax deductible.
Local/municipal government may pass local laws determining how they wish to handle those who can't pay, those who won't pay, homeless, etc. These issues must always be controlled at the local level, not the national level. Someone in Macon, GA shouldn't have to be taxed to handle problems in Nome, AK. Local government can decide who to handle those who may require payment plans, debt forgiveness, etc.
No law will affect those who wish to contract private doctors for services, whether using cash or insurance. These payments for insurance premiums or medical fees are also tax deductible.
If healthcare is such a crisis then it affects everyone equally. We should be making it as easy and available as it can be without restricting people's access to it through government social experiments.
I just check my mail using my phone. It has many features.
Are you guys still using the 80's Gordon Gecko phone or something? Buy something from this century.
How important can your email be anyway? Are you hanging out at the mall with the kids and realize you desperately need to short sell MSFT or close on a business deal? All the people I know doing that 1) have approprate technology rather than relying on public terminals and 2) are spending there time trying to avoid unencrypted wireless networks and "MegaHoc v.22" and "Free Public WiFi!" virus hotspots.
I've noticed that people who oppose telecommuting are the same people that need constant "management" and "training" and being "in the loop", and accuse the telecommuters of not paying attention to what's going on, become ineffective, etc.
I think what's being seen is how much uselessness actually goes on in companies, and what's revealed when the victims of that uselessness stop showing up.
I'e noticed, in my meandering experience, that most companies are held together by a few winners and a crap load of losers. The people that want to stay home, do the actual fifteen minutes of work that their job requires once all the idiocy strips away, are generally winners. They get things done. They manage their time. They DON'T want to be subjected to morons who won't do their jobs. They are smart enough to cram "real" work into the shortest amount of time.
Those who don't like others telecommuting want lots of ad hoc meetings, conference calls, in person meetings, etc. They are, I assume, terrified of asynchronous communication methods like email or voicemail. The other option perhaps is that they are unable to do anything useful whatsoever, and like lots of social time, ad hoc meetings to get info for them to do their jobs correctly, or like to position themselves in the organization. When the winner stop showing up to help losers to their job and take credit, they get all "itchy" and have mental breakdowns.
Am I alone here? Is it just the one loser who telecommutes or is it mostly those who can do their job independently, quickly, are self-reliant, and able to work without micromanagement? You know, like the job posting always asks for but the company actively prevents?
...I see a lot of slashdotters getting the rubber glove for their relatively poor bathing habits, weird beards, and fear of being on planes with actual girls and not ones that can inflate automatically or by breathing into a tube on either side (although, even if the girl isn't fully inflated, oxygen is flowing).
Everytime I read one of these articles, it reminds me of other writers trying to predict the future and failing miserably. Let me approach this from a psychological angle.
The hope of people coming up with these grandiose ideas and theories is that they hit, or at least become "moderately" true, then they become "famous" and the "father of such-and-such". By throwing a theory out, they hope it sticks, and therefore get credit and book deals and honorary degrees for being so forward thinking.
The benefit of throwing stupid ideas out, at least in America, is that it doesn't matter how wrong you are, because it'll be forgotten and you can just reinvent yourself later with more ideas.
For example, in the seventies there was the horror of the Population Bomb, where by the 90s there would be no food, faminie would kill billions, Africa destroyed, blah blah blah. What happened? Nothing. Less people are starving now than then. The postulation was that the earth couldn't physically provide the food to feed us. Same thing with Global Cooling, which was big in the 70s, and we were all going to die, etc. This was, of course, before they realized that blaming the earth wouldn't work, and there was much more money to be made blaming people instead. Then the SAME people reinvented themselves as Global Warming trendsetters, but with people to blame there's money to make.
People put forth ideas that sound silly, and they usually are. Get rid of IT? Yeah, that makes sense. As a business owner I love the ideas of having no control over my data, personal emails, proprietary documents, custom reports, and having people from other countries controlling it all. Does that sound like a good idea to anyone? One of the biggest problems my clients face is that they've outsourced all there processing and data capabilites, and now they have to spend zillions just to get access to their own data for a "custom report".
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They deserve it. They've completely screwed themselves by not having even a nodding look at conservatism. Republicans had their time to prove themselves, and they proved they're just as bad and hypocritical as the democrats, and now they're going to lose the exectuive and legislative branches.
Many people, regardless of their "party" or lack thereof, are fiscally conservative and socially liberal in their day to day lives. We generally don't want to pay 90% in taxes, and we don't generally care what people do in their own homes, in their own lives, and we prefer if they don't get involved in telling us what we should be doing in our own lives either.
democrats and republicans have both failed completely, frankly I don't know what the difference is, other than republican's extremism is religion and democrat's extremism is environmental.
I've consulted at two companies now, which I won't mention, which used Tata in order to outsource, and in both cases the people that "made the deal" were getting a "per-hour" arrangement with Tata.
If you've never contracted through a third party before...it's common to receive a few bucks an hour of the billable time any other contractor you recommend to your agent or third party. I've made a dollar-an-hour "finders fee" for recommending someone that was later picked up by the client for every hour they billed. This is much like the bonuses at companies that give you a taste if you recommend another employee to be hired.
At the companies that used Tata, the same system was at the top level too. The executive at the top level that made the deal also got a small percentage of every Tata resource that was utilized. Multiply that by several dozen resources or more, and you can imagine the incentive to move as many jobs to Tata as possible by this executive.
I even saw a benefit by this. One of my clients that I was placed at had a large contract with the agency I went through. They "let me go" as a contractor during a time that they were cutting costs, but because the budget had already been sent to the agency, they continued to pay me to "work from home" and do virtually nothing just so the Director of the division could get his percentage cut.
One wonders what Nielson needs to outsource to Tata for anyway. Their internet and TV ratings divisions daya can be analyzed and OLAPed by any basic data analysis of the participating members...one wonders what they need to outsource. Pay them to watch the shows themselves?
"Black" operations are a good thing. In war are we supposed to be in red coats on a hill while our leaders make BraveHeart "Win one for The Gipper" morale-boosting comments?
Then we all run screaming into a big mess in the middle with weapons flying all over the place?
You WANT nothing but "black" operations. The only people hurt in a standard war are:
You want wars where there little chance of you, a friend, or a family member getting hurt, killed, or in turn losing someone. You want to have professional special operations teams in foreign lands killing bad guys, disrupting their operations, destroying their credibility through propoganda, and keeping them from being able to cause you problems. If ~1000 special operations people, intelligence advisors, technical advisors and the like can keep you from having to be conscripted into an army you don't want to be in, then it's a good thing. If "black" operations can help prevent a hundred thousand citizens who don't even support their dictatorship from being "collateral damage" then it's a good thing. If you can limit your targets to the "bunker" people in a war, that's the absolute best thing.
Screw these lies. We know they're hacking, they know they're hacking. What are we stupid?
Anyone who's played Red Alert Generals knows that the Chinese Generals ALL have hackers you can be bought after you buy the barracks and upgrades.
Those bastards can endlessly hack for money or control buildings. They build their own internet cafe for Christ's sake! "We'll suck the internet dry" is the quote they say as when they steal money.
Damn lying Chinese. They're craftier than the Soviets with their lies. Or is it "Ries"? Damn them to hell.
Typical isn't it? Every time there's a judge or jury member who supports constitutional rights, individual responsibility or choice, or really any sense of freedoms, there almost always comes up some sort of scandal with them, I don't know, practicing or supporting those rights. If this was an RIAA case, it would have been him posting up his personal playlist on a website or keeping his (legal) mp3s on a fileshare he didn't know others could see.
Whenever a judge or prosecutor ends up having KKK affiliation, being a secret member of the communist or nazi party, guilty of corruption or bribery, hiding or manufacturing evidence, or anything of the like, you hear about it years AFTER the cases that they sent people to prison, sent someone for the past 50 years on death row, created case law to screw the American citizen just a little harder, etc.
Maybe it's just me. I must have a guilty conscience with something to hide.
Personally I hate instant messaging. I uninstall it if the network force installs it, and barring that, I disable it through any means necessary, and boy do I get in trouble with that.
My issue stems from a privacy angle and a productivity angle. I'm in one of those positions where (and I'm sure I'm alone here) I do all my work without any assistance because I know what I'm doing, and recent hires and offshore has no idea what they're doing so I receive 800 phones calls, emails, and IMs a day so that I can do THEIR work, in addition to all my work.
When I have a technical question about the work I'm doing, I generally look in the help files, look up the API in a programmers reference, query MSDN, or archaic eastern european websites for the answer. My "coworkers" would not only be useless to ask, but would actually give even worse information if I was to ask them. Call me an elitist bitch if you want.
When they don't know what to do (such as something complicated like trying to write a Sql statement that returns the date or write a bubble sort algorithm) I'm the first person to bother, because as we all know, the internet has no factual information on it, only porn and pedophiles.
If I use IM software, every jackass bothers me into the ground with inane, useless questions and comments, which do nothing but waste my time doing their work.
I tried to use the "flag" to show me busy, out of office, unavailable, in a meeting, or whatever, and then I get phone calls and emails wondering where I am, if I'm taking a sick day, etc.
Screw IMs. IMs work great for 1) unproductive people that want to bother others and be social rather than look up information on their own because they are lazy, 2) managers who want to electronically monitor someone realtime and stack more shit on their plate and, 3) the client who wants 300 status updates a day on some production issue, ignoring their place in the food chain and queue of workload.
It's easier just to claim the image is corrupt or it's "not working", and keep destroying it whenever the network reinstalls it.
The sun isn't changing. Man causes climate change, the climate change causes solar activity to change.
Now that I've proved it the solution is to create a economic cap-and-trade system that creates a secondary market for the redistribution of wealth from people that earned it(good, bad, ugly, fairly, or unfairly) to people that didn't.
Surely you know that the movements of pieces of green paper around the earth will cause a perfect eden to exist like northern California worldwide don't you?
The only people one should be afraid of are your fellow passengers who meekly go to their deaths like sheep.
I've always gotten in trouble for this opinion: 100% of the blame for 9/11 does not belong to the government, the airlines, failures with the CIA, George Bush, or anything else. The fault lies with the passengers on the planes that were used in the attacks.
I have always found it sad that, as a people, we've beome so easily exploitable but then, I do blame our school systems and political climate for producing citizens that would allow this to happen.
American Airlines 11 had 81 passengers, plus pilots and crew.
United Airlines 175 had 56 passengers plus pilots and crew.
Assume five hijackers per plane. The hijackers were armed with rudimentary knives, not guns, so they could only engage in 1-on-1 combat at best. A passenger ratio of 16 to 1 and 11 to 1 respectively per hijacker.
In another time and culture they would have all been killed immediately, or at least incapacitated and turned over to authorities.
This is what happens when you mold a culture of compliance, obedience, group-think, disrespect for individual rights and freedoms, fear of self-defense, and a the-government-will-take-care-of-me mentality.
So the TSA is requiring IDs and busting you if you don't give them through refusal instead of having "lost" it. You've been trained to accept being treated like this. Want to see something sad? Go to the airport (if it's setup correctly), get a coffee, and sit and just watch for about 30 minutes the people going through the security lines. Watch your fellow citizens file in line, take their shoes off, throw away shampoo, open laptops and cellphones and all the other ridiculous things that are done. Over and over and over.
Go watch that and then go read any newspaper and see another story about how two kids had a grade school shoving match, and rather than be told "break it up, get your ass back in class", they are arrested, expelled, and have zero-tolerance policies thrown at them.
What is being taught is not "violence isn't the answer to any of life's problems"; they're being taught that even thinking about defending oneself or standing up for oneself IS MET WITH HARSH PUNISHMENT.
So we are educating more and more young people to become complacent, obedient, and fearful people. I have some younger friends of mine that are afraid to go and challenge a traffic ticket, or aren't even aware a traffic court system exists to do so. One is terrified to return food that they are unsatisfied with in a restaurant because they think they'll get in trouble and the manager will (I guess) be critical or mean to them.
But to get back on point. As long as we're used to doing whatever we're told, you'll see asanine rules like this. It isn't important that you don't have ID, what's important is that YOU ARE STANDING UP TO US AND MUST BE PUNISHED.
You've got to be schizering me.
Coerce or harrass? I'm pretty sure there were a few landmark cases about First Amendment rights and being able to harrass and coerce people. Does this mean that I can cry foul when I see something "icky" on TV that "upsets" me?
It's getting time to buy a boat built to last and get the hell off off the American land-mass.
I hope this finally serves as a "wake up call" for Linux lickers and lovers that using Linux does increase chances of violence and murder. For too long now Linux lovers have accused Microsoft of tomfoolery, when Microsoft has only delivered wholesome, moral, and radidly patched products.
Perhaps now they'll finally start listening to the studies that Linux and open-source leads to genital herpes and PWNING your wife with a .45 and a shovel.
The main thing I learned from studying psychology for six years in university is that every study apparently has an agenda, and with all the ones I participated in as a member or a researcher, they are all based on faulty assumptions about how humans work, and how people respond when they know they're being studied.
The "conclusions" below, are inherently rife with all sorts of debatable points.
* developed an increased sexual callousness toward women
Or the kind of people that will get paid/studied to watch hard core porn for weeks are the kind of people that already have sexual callousness.
What the hell is sexual callousness anyway? I'd argue that it's the default setting for males, who are not mate-for-life animals, despite what the Bride Magazine and the Bible leads us to believe.
* began to trivialize rape as a criminal offense or no longer considered it a crime at all
Or were just being more honest about what they actually thought. Few people run around telling everyone they know they trivialize rape, murder or such due to the social consequences. I'm pretty sure I'm not the first person to consider murder as a viable alternative to dealing with customers or employers or family members. In America we trivialize rape, murder, and violence constantly in our culture. Football and UFC are acceptable "alternatives" to violence that we aren't allowing ourselves to do, so we invent a rule-based sport, unless we can make a case for war somewhere on earth, then we do it with a vengence. Rape was never considered a crime in marriage, until very very recently. Women married in their early teens. Hard core porn exists because it's something we cannot acceptably do, though plenty of people want to. Porn doesn't invent the desire. We have the desire so some people like it. We don't like abused children, but B. Spears claimed to be a virgin in a schoolgirl costume and sold a whole lot of albums. I'm sure eveyone watched her videos for the music.
* developed distorted perceptions about sexuality
That's agenda all over. What is "distorted"? Anything other than missionary? Bologna. Define normal please.
* developed an appetite for more deviant, bizarre, or violent types of pornography (normal sex no longer seemed to do the job)
Normal sex rarely does the job anyway, but I'm a pervert. I'm sure oral sex is deviant and bizarre too (so silly, you'll never make a baby that way). I feel sure that this study should have concluded that wasting time trying to give the girl an orgasm is bizarre and distorted. In my biology classes they stressed that female orgasms are not relevent to procreation. The Bible we're supposed to procreate, not enjoy it, so she doesn't get one. Amen.
* devalued the importance of monogamy and lacked confidence in marriage as either a viable or lasting institution
Agenda. Monogamy is an invention from thousands of years ago to protect children and provide for women. It isn't natural at all, for men or women. I base this on the observation that almost everyone has had sex with more than one person (slashdot excepted) and many times cheat on each other. Also, we apparently have divorces from monogamy, when it get's too boring, so we don't take it that seriously.
* viewed nonmonogamous relationships as normal and natural behaviorxi
Agenda. That's because it isn't normal behavior. We lust or have sexual thoughts about other people all the time. We may emotionally have strong connections to an individual, but sexually it's normal to think of someone else now and then or appreciate a woman's assets as she walks by.
I haven't paid for a movie in years. I found this neat little tool that get's me pretty much any movie I want for free.
They call it a library card.
I hadn't heard of the thing before, but there was this big building with lots of bums sleeping around it (just like Blockbuster) which had a wide variety of books, movies, and music where I'd walk in, grab a bunch of movies and such, use my card, and walk out.
The best part was I didn't have to fill up my house with DVDs or buy bigger drives to store them on. When I was done with it I just tossed it in this big box at the building (I guess they recycle the DVDs, I don't know).
I've told my friends about this but they just laugh and call me a nerd, but when you're technically advanced I guess there are always detractors.
This will continue, of course, until the fetishization of children decreases, and by that I mean the fetishzation of children by their parents and government.
Ignoring relatively recent human history where children in their early teens were married off, soldiers in wars, or running businesses/plantations/families, we have now created an overindulgent culture of keeping adults as children as long as humanly possible for the enjoyment of parents and politicians who exploit them.
An aquaintance of mine refers to her dog as "puppy" and treats him as such, regardless of the fact that the dog is 13 years old and on it's last legs. The dog is completely untrained, as to be expected, but now is not even getting some required medical care for a dog of it's age because that might be some sign that the animal isn't a puppy nor immortal.
Sadly, most of the "parents" I know now are doing similar things with their children. I've overheard conversations between parents chiding each other for cutting junior's hair ("His curls are so cute! We can't cut them!", "Yes, but he's 8 and looks like a roadie from Foghat"), not letting a 6 year old stay up until 3a.m ("She's playing! We have to let children be children!", "Yes dear, but I have to set up for Foghat in the morning."), and my favorite told to my idiot 14 year old nephew ("It doesn't matter what grade that teacher gave you, as long as you tried your best that's all that matters."). Having tried that technique of project completion with employers has met with limited success.
Luckily, if the child might be showing any signs of rebellion, intelligence, or desire to flourish on their own terms, there are a slew of "disease du jour" and designer drugs to keep them in that glassy-eyed / dopey-smiled state of puppiness. Autism/aspergers/marjoram/whatever is always available in case junior shows a but too much resistance. Pigeon hole them now, keep them in size XXL diapers when they're 16, and keep them from ever leaving mommey and daddy's side. Because as long as they stay, mommy and daddy aren't really, you know, grown-ups or old themselves.
Now I'm sure there are plenty of kids with "real" mental issues out there. I suspect if the bell curve is to be believed that at least 50% of the population has difficulty telling one end of a chalupa from another, and if special-ed classes and living with their parents until they're 40 gets my drive-thru order right at least most of the time, then it can't be all that bad.
Before I get modded for being too off topic, let me seamlessly tie that right back in to the article somehow.
Although real child abuse does occur, most likely it isn't the creepy guy in the street with the bad haircut and thick glasses on slashdot, it's the parent, family relative, or friend that does most of the molesting/abuse. The german sex-ring isn't photographing little Briegh or Taylour as they play in the back yard, it's the baby sitter or cousin or uncle Joe who is doing far worse when no one's watching, and since families rarely turn in one of their own, it's just quietly kept under wraps like the Catholic Church did with "misbehaving" priests who had a taste for alter boys.
Politicians, knowing this but powerless to prevent it, love to pick up the banner of saving the children from some unknown danger from one of those southeast asian countries with a sex-ring and is much more marketable than passing laws that would prosecute a mother as an accessory who stands by allowing their children to be molested by their new boyfriend but pretending it isn't happening because she doesn't want to "rock the boat".
It doesn't matter that laws that would prosecute a completely digitally created image where no abuse occurred to anyone would also include 450 year old paintings that show fat naked cherubs (with little penii!) flying around Aphrodite getting it on, consenting adults role playing together (any second they'll have the urge to molest real kids, like them homosexuals!), or the XTian bible raping virgi
Or I could just plug in a cable and stop being PR0N free...free as the wind blows....free as the grass grows...
...and so on.
I just hook my phone up to the USB port and use the external internet connection when I'm wasting time at work. Why go through the firewalls and proxy servers who don't even allow me to download pr0n to post random useless crap?
I refuse to be fired for my pr0n love. It's a legal disability.
Foreign ticket holders will most likely be people of wealth/influence compared to the general population; Guojia Anquan Bu will collate and data mine all the information for likely targets for intelligence gathering.
Having comprehensive preliminary data on ticket holders will allow agents to be assigned to high-value individuals, either for passive intelligence gathering, such as profiling for future contact, economic franchising (here's what China can do for your organization), or more active measures (finding those with weaknesses or proclivities that could be later exploited for blackmail/extortion, such as having them approached by prostitutes, etc.).
"The movie established that the skulls attract "artifacts" (almost in an intelligent way), possibly due to the aliens' obsession with human culture. Also, shotgun pellets are NOT made of lead, despite what the common name may suggest :)"
Alright, I'll give you that one. Perhaps the skulls attract "artifacts", however they also attract rapier swords, pieces of random metal, and fragmentation grenade explosive powder. I'm not sure exactly where those come in. That MAY explain the room with the artifacts from around the world, but I'm not buying something with the power to pull artifacts, but getting fooled by a piece of cheesecloth being draped over me doesn't make sense. Neither does repelling ants. And if a piece of cloth over the eyes prevents it, then how did it pull things when it was in the steel coffin in area 51? I still think it's pretty weak.
"Oh come on, are we going to start holding continuity shots against movies now? Seriously. Pick on something worthwhile."
In the case of a bunch of minitures blowing around a fake tiny town to emulate an explosion yes I will. This is not my work that I did with a webcam, this was one of the biggest special effects companies on the planet, who can make Greedo fire first. Not getting the fan to blow correctly on the set is not an excuse for being so blatant it's all I could see. It's not like I'm arguing a continuity flaw such as not having a fan blow on a couple of Jedi hanging out in a speeder 1000 ft. above a planet going 200 mph while their hair doesn't even blow slightly. Because that would be stupid.
"Because it's ALIEN, INTER-DIMENSIONAL technology? Seriously, you can't complain about ET phone home suckage in one sentence, and then complain about how their fantastic aliens were UNREALISTIC."
Oh you misunderstand. I'm have no problem with alien interdimensional vacuum cleaners. They can do what they want. I cannot go with is a swirling city sized flying saucer come rising out of the ground, pull up giant chunks of rock and bedrock and ancient temples, then they hover in the air before remembering what gravity is after all the other pieces fell down.
I will say that all my bitching isn't relevent. It's just funny, and exists in any sci-fi movies these days. The entertainment and comedic level now exceeds the wonder level. I can live movies that have just given up completely.
What bothered me more was the change in canon / mythos in a series of stories (or serials as I'm sure georgie thinks of them). Prof. Jones used to be about sharing information with the world. Things needing to be in museums. Defeating evil that wants to use it's power for evil purposes. He also was always making a moral or ethical choice in some way. In Raiders he got the ark, then gave it to the government and didn't keep the power to himself, who then locked it away in area 51 apparently. In Temple he returned the magic stones to the villagers after rescuing their children from brutal conditions. In Grail he was trying to save his father and when making a choice between being seduced by the grail and giving it up, he realized the futility and what was important and let it go.
In this one, I don't know why Jones is even on this quest. He starts out as kidnapped by Soviets and escapes. Then, I guess, he decides to follow the skull and tacitly look for John Hurt. He returns the skull for reasons that aren't completely clear, other than it's supposed to be "returned". He doesn't make a moral choice about using the skull's powers for himself or trying to claim the "reward" (whatever that was) for himself. He basically runs away. You may be able to argue "Well, he got Marion and a son, because he's shown throughout the characters history that he has always wanted that." That might work if I believe that BS line about "the other women weren't you.", but that seems kind of weak.
Perhaps there was a scene I missed an important statement in. Maybe a scene explaining more about what was going on with the characters was cut in the end and will explain more on the DVD.
That sounds more like the "Dilbert Principle". The Peter Principle says that people rise to their level of incompetence. For example, you are a C# developer, if you do well you may be promoted to dev manager or similar, but no higher because, say, you don't have an MBA and would therefore be incompetent at that level. You WOULD know what developers below you were doing, but you couldn't rise higher than you are. The Dilbert Principle says that incompetent people will be promoted. For example, your dev manager knows nothing about code, so he was put in charge of code because he sucked (or most likely just politically transferred in, but I digress). In my case, I have a manager that doesn't understand crap about what I do, therefore he makes consistently stupid decisions and has stupid ideas, "Why do we HAVE to have a web server to run a website?", or "The web application is throwing database connection errors? It must be the website is down." or my favorite "I want to talk directly to the mainframe instead of the database to get the data, can we do that by the end of the week?"
DO NOT READ AS THIS MAY SPOIL YOUR MOVIE EXPERIENCE, IF FOR SOME REASON YOU THOUGHT IT WOULD BE A POSITIVE THING
The new Indiana Jones was, frankly, the biggest POS I have ever had the displeasure of watching, and I was a huge fan of the original three.
Once I saw the green LucasFilm logo and Exec. Prod. credit for Lucas I had the same weird feeling that I had at the beginning of Phantom Menace, which I also get when eating Taco Bell, with pretty much the same end result.
Luckily I obtained a free advance screening, so I didn't have to spend a dime on this crap, but even that doesn't change the awfulness of this film.
I had heard some rumors of an "area 51" or "alien" type of theme rather than the usual religious one, but I figured it would be passing references, or perhaps some nifty little ending like they did with the warehouse scene at the end of Raiders or something.
But then I remembered George was involved, AND I remembered what idiocy Steven did to E.T. with radios and such. Luckily, there won't be remakes of this like E.T., because they got it all out of the way in this one.
Rather than ruin the plot, whatever it was, here's a random list of stuff that sucked. Don't read it if you like the fantasy of Indiana Jones.
1. Shia the Beef as a 50s Biker; I assume a gay 50s biker, who bitches like a gay Biker for no apparent reason.
2. All the soldiers on the army base having been deployed to Iraq, or missing for no apparent reason. "Closed for weapons testing" means that all the soldiers and contractors go home.
3. Colonel Henry Jones, master spy for the CIA.
4. Col. Jones being interrogated by the FBI for being a Soviet agent, but is let off because some random character "vouches" for him.
5. Col. Jones being fired from his job for being a Soviet agent.
6. Col. Jones being promoted to a better job for being a Soviet agent.
7. Col. Jones, in Berlin, being a double agent.
8. Director Steven, shamelessly plugging his kid in the diner scene.
9. Crazy Primitive Alien Monkees in a graveyard running away from a gun and disappearing with no explanation.
10. A crystal skull designed by H.R. Geiger, which wouldn't have sucked in another movie, but chooses to in this one.
11. Gold is not magnetic, neither is lead.
12. An awful premonition that you will be subjected to Jar Jar.
13. An Army of the Dead, which apparently left the set to star in Diary of the Dead, as they seemed absent from the film. Luckily, the Crazy Primitive Alien Monkees were able to stand in for them.
14. Apparently ILM still hasn't figured out gravity. In the real world, lighter pebble sized objects may stay aloft because of high winds, however rocks the size of office buildings tend to fall. In the ILM world, dust settles, then giant rocks hang aloft in a way I haven't seen since a Coyote held up a sign after running off a cliff 20 seconds earlier.
15. A room containing every artifact of every culture ever, for no apparently explained reason.
16. Yay, it's Jar Jar! No wait, a dozen Jar Jars!
17. Jar Jar promising you a gift for freeing him after thousands of years, but when you ask for something benign that ancient carvings have shown he gave everyone else on the planet, he kills you for no reason.
18. Triple agents?
19. In the past, the bad guys were eaten by crocodiles, had high speed aging to dust, or exploded and melted for pissing God off. Now if you are male, Jar Jar kills you with an advanced vacuum cleaner, if you are female he kills you with Wikipedia then an advanced vacuum cleaner.
20. Assistant Dean Super CIA Col. Henry "Indiana" Higgins Jones get's hitched?
21. A teleporting hat?
22. An atomic blast, which destroys buildings, has to make a second pass because it forgot the mannequins hanging out in front of the buildings.
23. Col. Jones, Master Spy, is rescued by Shia the Beef with what appears to be a large g
I've never understood this "universal national socialized insurance" thing. I thought this was about going to a doctor.
I'll admit I didn't grow up in the United States, but isn't medical care, going to a doctor, dentist, whatever, just another good or service?
When did a good or a service become a "right" that one has, to the extent that you have the government stick a gun in someone else's face and a hand in their pocket to force them to pay for it?
If I can't be forced at gunpoint to take a stranger to dinner and pay for it (food being a clear and present biological requirement for life), why am I forced at gunpoint to pay for someone to see a doctor (medical care being a series of theories, guesses, best practices, empirical research, and pharmacology)?
I don't understand this adherence to propoganda that everyone is talking about. If the "issue" is about medical care (which seems to be just a "class warfare" discussion from what I've observed ("THEY" pay for a good or service so "THEY" are rich/evil and the "OTHERS" don't pay for the good or service so the "OTHERS" are victims of "THEY") then WHY are you discussing insurance? Is someone going to be lying on the floor bleeding and desperately clutching an insurance contract?
I'm don't understand why people would want an insurance company (or the goverment) making the medical decisions instead of the patient and the doctor. An insurance company's primary goal is to make as much profit as possible, by paying out less in claims that in takes in from premiums. The government's primary goal is to control you as much as possible and separate you from your money. Can someone explain to me exactly WHY you want either of these organizations to control your healthcare?
At one point I remember hearing about nationalized / socialized health care from politicians. Then the language changed so the argument was about health insurance. Doesn't anyone find that a little strange? I hear all these moral and ethical stories about "helping the poor" and "so and so was turned away from the hospital because she couldn't pay" and such. Yet with such moral outrage and despair, the solution is an insurance contract? I'd think with such a horrible fate for citizens that it would be easy to set up a program like:
Immediately offer low interest student loans to encourage students to go into medicine. The loan paid in full by the government following the successful completion of the 5 year low salary (by doctor standards) employment contract in a licensed clinic/hospital, subject to oversite and auditing by the Health Department.
Anyone can go to a clinic at any time for any reason. They MUST pay an inflation adjusted $50 payment, regardless of what services they are using, or what their means are. The payment is used to offset equipment costs, doctors salaries, payback of student loans, administration, etc. This payment is tax deductible.
Local/municipal government may pass local laws determining how they wish to handle those who can't pay, those who won't pay, homeless, etc. These issues must always be controlled at the local level, not the national level. Someone in Macon, GA shouldn't have to be taxed to handle problems in Nome, AK. Local government can decide who to handle those who may require payment plans, debt forgiveness, etc.
No law will affect those who wish to contract private doctors for services, whether using cash or insurance. These payments for insurance premiums or medical fees are also tax deductible.
If healthcare is such a crisis then it affects everyone equally. We should be making it as easy and available as it can be without restricting people's access to it through government social experiments.
I just check my mail using my phone. It has many features.
Are you guys still using the 80's Gordon Gecko phone or something? Buy something from this century.
How important can your email be anyway? Are you hanging out at the mall with the kids and realize you desperately need to short sell MSFT or close on a business deal? All the people I know doing that 1) have approprate technology rather than relying on public terminals and 2) are spending there time trying to avoid unencrypted wireless networks and "MegaHoc v.22" and "Free Public WiFi!" virus hotspots.
I've noticed that people who oppose telecommuting are the same people that need constant "management" and "training" and being "in the loop", and accuse the telecommuters of not paying attention to what's going on, become ineffective, etc.
I think what's being seen is how much uselessness actually goes on in companies, and what's revealed when the victims of that uselessness stop showing up.
I'e noticed, in my meandering experience, that most companies are held together by a few winners and a crap load of losers. The people that want to stay home, do the actual fifteen minutes of work that their job requires once all the idiocy strips away, are generally winners. They get things done. They manage their time. They DON'T want to be subjected to morons who won't do their jobs. They are smart enough to cram "real" work into the shortest amount of time.
Those who don't like others telecommuting want lots of ad hoc meetings, conference calls, in person meetings, etc. They are, I assume, terrified of asynchronous communication methods like email or voicemail. The other option perhaps is that they are unable to do anything useful whatsoever, and like lots of social time, ad hoc meetings to get info for them to do their jobs correctly, or like to position themselves in the organization. When the winner stop showing up to help losers to their job and take credit, they get all "itchy" and have mental breakdowns.
Am I alone here? Is it just the one loser who telecommutes or is it mostly those who can do their job independently, quickly, are self-reliant, and able to work without micromanagement? You know, like the job posting always asks for but the company actively prevents?
...robotic flies build you!
...I see a lot of slashdotters getting the rubber glove for their relatively poor bathing habits, weird beards, and fear of being on planes with actual girls and not ones that can inflate automatically or by breathing into a tube on either side (although, even if the girl isn't fully inflated, oxygen is flowing).
Everytime I read one of these articles, it reminds me of other writers trying to predict the future and failing miserably. Let me approach this from a psychological angle.
The hope of people coming up with these grandiose ideas and theories is that they hit, or at least become "moderately" true, then they become "famous" and the "father of such-and-such". By throwing a theory out, they hope it sticks, and therefore get credit and book deals and honorary degrees for being so forward thinking.
The benefit of throwing stupid ideas out, at least in America, is that it doesn't matter how wrong you are, because it'll be forgotten and you can just reinvent yourself later with more ideas.
For example, in the seventies there was the horror of the Population Bomb, where by the 90s there would be no food, faminie would kill billions, Africa destroyed, blah blah blah. What happened? Nothing. Less people are starving now than then. The postulation was that the earth couldn't physically provide the food to feed us. Same thing with Global Cooling, which was big in the 70s, and we were all going to die, etc. This was, of course, before they realized that blaming the earth wouldn't work, and there was much more money to be made blaming people instead. Then the SAME people reinvented themselves as Global Warming trendsetters, but with people to blame there's money to make.
People put forth ideas that sound silly, and they usually are. Get rid of IT? Yeah, that makes sense. As a business owner I love the ideas of having no control over my data, personal emails, proprietary documents, custom reports, and having people from other countries controlling it all. Does that sound like a good idea to anyone? One of the biggest problems my clients face is that they've outsourced all there processing and data capabilites, and now they have to spend zillions just to get access to their own data for a "custom report".